A team representing Geneva Middle School North achieved Highest Honors in the recent WordMasters Challenge™—a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 150,000 students annually. The eighth grade team scored an impressive 189 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing sixth in the nation.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the WordMasters Challenge™, eighth grader Ryan Klemm earned a perfect score of 20 on the challenge. Nationally, only 40 eighth graders achieved this result. Other students from Geneva Middle School North who achieved outstanding results in the meet include eighth graders Matt Dutton, Matt Grandquist, Brian Wagner, Ian Watson, Colton Benjamin, Abby Bourbeau and Morgan Feeney. Competing in the very difficult Gold Division, outstanding results were achieved by sixth graders Emily Howell and Dylan Pratt.
The WordMasters Challenge™ is an exercise in critical thinking that first encourages students to become familiar with a set of interesting new words (considerably harder than grade level), and then challenges them to use those words to complete analogies expressing various kinds of logical relationships. Working to solve the analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. Although most vocabulary enrichment and analogy-solving programs are designed for use by high school students, WordMasters Challenge™ materials have been specifically created for younger students in grades three through eight. They are particularly well suited for children who are motivated by the challenge of learning new words and enjoy the logical puzzles posed by analogies.